The Iași pogrom took place over four days from 28 June to 1 July 1941, in the Romanian city of Iași in the eastern part of the country. Between 13,000 and 15,000 Jews were murdered, most of them by Romanian soldiers, police and civilians, with German encouragement but only limited German participation. It was one of the largest pogroms in modern European history and one of the earliest mass killings of the Holocaust. It was carried out by Romania, not Germany, and that fact has shaped how it has been remembered, denied and finally acknowledged.
The setting
Romania entered the Second World War on the side of Germany on 22 June 1941, the day Operation Barbarossa began. Romanian forces took part in the invasion of Soviet territory alongside the Wehrmacht. The country was ruled by the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had come to power in 1940 in alliance with the fascist Iron Guard movement. Romania had a long-standing antisemitic political culture, with formal restrictions on Jewish citizenship that predated the German alliance. Iași, an ancient city in the Moldavian region near the Soviet border, had a Jewish population of around 50,000, roughly half its total population.
From the first days of the war, the Romanian government and press accused local Jews of signalling to Soviet aircraft, of harbouring communist sympathies and of preparing armed resistance behind the lines. None of these accusations had any factual basis. They were the standard repertoire of Romanian antisemitic agitation, recycled to provide a wartime justification for what was about to happen.
The pogrom
On the evening of 28 June 1941, a coordinated operation began across Iași. Romanian troops and gendarmes, joined by civilian mobs and members of the Iron Guard, broke into Jewish homes and businesses. Jews were dragged into the streets and beaten. Men were shot in their courtyards in front of their families. Women were raped. Children were murdered alongside their parents. By the morning of 29 June, several thousand Jews were dead in the streets of the city.
The surviving Jewish men were herded to the police headquarters and held in the courtyard. Many were shot there. Several thousand more were beaten over the course of the day. The Romanian authorities then announced that the survivors would be taken to a labour camp. They were marched to the railway station and packed into closed freight wagons, with no water and no ventilation, in summer heat that reached over thirty-five degrees Celsius.
The death trains
Two trains left Iași on 30 June. The first, with around 2,500 Jews on board, travelled south for eight days, sealed shut, in the heat. It was deliberately routed to take the longest possible path. When it was finally opened at Calarasi, fewer than 1,000 of the original passengers were still alive. The second train, with around 1,900 Jews, took six days. Around 1,200 were dead when it arrived at Podu Iloaiei, a station only fifteen miles from Iași. The Romanian guards opened the wagon doors at intervals to remove the dead, then sealed them again and continued the journey.
The death trains have given the Iași pogrom a place in Holocaust memory distinct from the larger but equivalent shooting massacres further east. They were a deliberate method of mass killing through suffocation and dehydration, on Romanian state orders, using Romanian state railways. The dead were buried in mass graves along the route.
The total dead
The Romanian Wiesel Commission, set up in 2003 under President Ion Iliescu and chaired by the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, established the death toll at between 13,266 and 14,850 people. The figure includes the killings in Iași itself, the killings during the round-ups, and the deaths on the trains. It is broadly accepted by mainstream historians.
The post-war record
Communist Romania, after the war, treated the Iași pogrom as a German crime. The Romanian role was minimised or denied. After the fall of communism in 1989, the post-Ceausescu governments continued for several years to play down the Romanian responsibility for the wartime persecution and murder of Romanian Jews. The Wiesel Commission report of 2004 was the formal end of that denial. The Romanian state has since established a national Holocaust day, on 9 October, marking the date of the start of the deportation of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews to Transnistria. The Iași pogrom is now part of the official Romanian historical record.
The Iași pogrom matters partly for its scale, partly for the trains, and partly because it was carried out almost entirely by Romanians on Romanians. The German army was in the city in small numbers and German soldiers and police took part, but the operation was Romanian state-organised and Romanian state-executed. It is a reminder that the Holocaust was not only a German crime. The German regime made the wider killing possible, and inspired and authorised it, but in many countries the killing was done by the country itself.
See also
Sources
- Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Polirom, 2004
- Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, Ivan R. Dee, 2000
- Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania, University of Nebraska Press, 2011
- USHMM: The Iași Pogrom